


Like Magic

by 17603



Category: Harry Potter - J. K. Rowling
Genre: Art, Gen, Muggle Life
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-06-02
Updated: 2014-06-02
Packaged: 2018-02-03 04:24:57
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,605
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1731035
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/17603/pseuds/17603
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Lavender Brown is less excited about being a witch than everyone seemed to think she should be.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Like Magic

**Author's Note:**

> I didn't realize that Lavender Brown wasn't muggleborn until after I wrote it, but I figured I would share anyway.

Lavender Brown is less excited about being a witch than everyone seemed to think she should be. Her parents ask the professor who shows up the day before her eleventh birthday loads of questions, punctuating his increasingly cross answers with "doesn't that sound brill, Lav" and "do you think you might like that" until he turns his cold beetle eyes on her. He's creepy, but he also looks a little pained, and somewhere far beneath that, an even littler bit understanding.

"Miss Brown," he says, "do you have any questions you wish to ask about Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry?"

She thinks about it for a good fifteen seconds, because while flying lessons and potions sounds promising, one must have priorities. "What kind of art classes do you have?"

His face goes pinched. It reminds her of the time she asked her mum what an orgasm was in the checkout line at Tesco. "I believe there is a painting club," he grinds out, "and the portraiture and sculpture adorning the halls has fascinating historical and cultural significance."

 

Something about the way he says _fascinating_ hints that it's probably not.

 

"What about fashion design?" She asks brightly, eyeing his nicely cut jacket, the tiny engraved snakes that seem to writhe on every tiny button from his waist to his throat. "Liverpool Technical Institute has an un-parra-lell-led fashion design program, for those wishing to pursue it at a higher level," she can recite their whole brochure and spent a glorious afternoon last term at one of their school tours, staring at the lines of sewing machines and the students clustered around mannequins like she could burn it all into her brain. The tour guide praised her questions, and one of the girls at the mannequins offered her a tiny smile, stepping aside to let Lavender better see the applique on the waistcoat she had on her dummy.

 

Her mother refuses to talk about it, and her dad gives her unfinished sentences whenever she asks, mostly starting with "you know we would" and "we'll see if" and "I'm sorry darling but".

 

Professor Snape, in his Victorian style jacket and ugly scuffed snakeskin-looking boots, has the good grace to be slightly surprised. Her parents start their unfinishable sentences, but she ignores them, glaring at him.

Eventually, he manages to say "your booklist will arrive in August, along with your train ticket and instructions on where supplies can be purchased."

 

Before he leaves, she gets him to show her his wand (Parvarti giggles at this, years later), and in what she later realizes to be a profoundly generous and deeply uncharacteristic gesture, he changes the teaspoon in his empty teacup into a spool of silver thread.

 

The thread smells faintly of milky tea, and Lavender takes it with her to Kings Cross on the first of September, tucked in the pocket of her new uniform, tie grey, crest blank, ready for The Sorting, whatever that is. In her bookbag, along with sandwiches from her mum and the tenner that her dad slipped her, she has Fanciful Fashions For The Frequently Frumpy, which looks interesting but far too thin to tell her everything she needs to know, and her brand new wand. Oh, it's nice and apparently has unicorn hair in it (the old man in the store told her it was springy, good for charms), but the it doesn't ease the pain at the thought that the cozy student studios, each with a sewing machine and adjustable mannequin, will go to twenty people and none of them will be her.

 

She couldn't care less about goblin wars and being good at charms and flying around on a broom, and when she makes eye contact with a grey-tied boy in jeans and trainers, busy cramming a sketchbook into an overflowing bookbag as pens (not quills) scatter everywhere, it's comforting to think she might not be alone in her disappointment.

 

When the hat mutters _brave to leave behind all you ever hoped for, you'll do quite well in GRYFFINDOR_ in her ear, all Lavender can think is _whatever_ , and that gold is so obnoxious compared to silver. Red isn't too bad, she can work with red. But people cheer, the food is very good and she can't help be impressed by the floating candles. Maybe this magic thing will be all right.

 

She can see the boy from the train staring upwards too, and when he catches her looking, she smiles instead of turning quickly away.

 

 

 

Later, she finds out that his name is Dean, he's not from a wizard family either, and he wants to draw comic books. They spend the first evening in the common room commiserating over the lack of telly, the lack of art classes, and how annoying robes are.

"The pockets are all right," Dean allows, "lots of room for a sketchbook and pencils."

Lavender nods, but thinks of the Fall Fashion she is missing out on. She only reminded her mum twenty times about forwarding her subscription to Vogue (her birthday present from grandma and grandfather every year), and she wonders how soon she can send her a letter with the twenty first reminder. She doesn't want to get too far behind.

 

Hermione Granger, one of her new dorm-mates, is also what they call a Muggle-Born, and for about fifteen minutes she daydreams about a possible new best friend. They can swap clothes and share the secret language of movies, books and pop music, as good as a code around people who talk about frog legs and newt eyes. When she actually meets Hermione, those daydreams curl up like old newspaper and she ends up kicking around with Parvarti Patil instead, who flips through her slowly growing pile of non-wizarding fashion magazines with wide eyes and reciprocates with catalogues from Gladrags and Formal Finery. All the clothing looks like old-lady clothing to Lavender, even the men's clothing, but she's starting to see the nuances, the _potential_ , even though she'd rather wear jeans any day. It seems like a lot of wizards would too, but instead of going to Muggle London for a well cut pair, they attempt to reverse engineer them and end up looking like her dad. It's tragic, really. Clearly, her talents are needed here more than anywhere else.

 

Lavender Brown has always tried to look on the bright side of things.

 

 

 

"Bloody robes," Dean mutters behind her one day on their way to Transfiguration. He's jammed his uniform in about five doors so far, although he's doing better than the poor Ravenclaw girl who went head over heels down a flight of stairs after her legs tangled.

"I keep treading on the hem of mine," another boy, Irish, Sean or something, moans. "Mam didn't want to take them up too far, in case I grew too much, and when I tried a shortening spell, I shrunk me other set half up me legs."

Lavender's ears prick up and she hangs back a little, falling into step with them. "Hemming's easy," she offers.

Dean elbows the boy. "Lavender's good at sewing, Seamus," he says ( _Seamus_ , of course), "she was going to go to school for fashion design before."

 

Before. It's always before. Before witchcraft and wizardry turned their lives upside down. It's not that she doesn't like it, she does, really, but it irritates her to be required to ignore so much, to have everything dismissed as silly Muggle stuff when it's clearly not. Anyway, if wizards want to see silly, they need look no further than Quidditch.

 

Seamus gets Hermione Granger to reverse the damage of the shrinking charm and Lavender hems both sets of his robes, and lets down the hem on Dean's in late November after he grows two inches, taking pride in every neat and even stitch, almost invisible when she's finished. Charms are fantastic, transfiguration has potential and potions would be fine if they learned useful things (who needs to spend hours making slug repellent when you can buy snail pellets at any supermarket, _honestly_ ) and Snape wasn't so hateful, but _this_ is what she loves.

 

 

 

The first year passes quickly. Towards the end, Harry Potter, who is famous for something he did as a baby and nice enough (for a Quidditch-mad boy), she supposes, helps win them the House Cup by almost dying. Hermione and Ron Weasley are in on it too, and Neville Longbottom, and as she's getting on the train for London, Lavender decides that as far as first years at a new school go, it went very well. Dean has been practically dancing all morning, he's saved his birthday and Christmas money and he spent all of breakfast describing the comics he is going to buy to Seamus, who is a rapt, if slightly confused, audience.

"Owl me, won't you," Parvarti says, Padma hovering just behind her, their smiles identically bright. A few people away, Dean is telling Seamus that he has to come visit, they'll go to a football match, he'll see how mad he is to think it's dull. She's going to miss Hogwarts a bit, maybe, but her mum got a new sewing machine last month, and her old one is now sitting in Lavender's room, waiting.

"Of course," she says, and is careful to look at them both when she tells them "you have to come visit."

They nod in unison, and when her mum and dad run up and swing her around in a big hug, she hears Parvarti telling Padma and a tall man who must be their dad _Lavender can do amazing things with sewing, like magic_.

 


End file.
